Comments for The Unbroken Windowhttp://theunbrokenwindow.com
Homines libenter quod volunt creduntSun, 11 Nov 2018 00:15:19 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Comment on What My 7th Grader Learns in History Class in the Pittsford Schools by WKhttp://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/11/05/what-my-7th-grader-learns-in-history-class-in-the-pittsford-schools/#comment-1656325
Sun, 11 Nov 2018 00:15:19 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12581#comment-1656325I have had discussions with my 10th grade daughter this weekend who had been asked to write an essay on immigration for her English class. All the reference sources she was provided by the teacher seemed to be pro open boarders; pro DACA; and based on emotional first person stories versus the existing law and what possible changes should be considered. Her basic question as a 10th grader was “do I write what I believe or what I think she wants to hear?”
]]>Comment on Choice > Voice, All Day Long by wintercow20http://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/11/04/choice-voice-all-day-long/#comment-1655568
Wed, 07 Nov 2018 11:52:37 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12578#comment-1655568But the post has little to do with the merits, or lack thereof, of the electoral college. It is simply asking about the consistency of accepting one set of democratic rules because it leads to results one likes versus another set which in an instance may not.
As far as the usefulness of the electoral college – we are long since past having a discussion of democratic reforms – if only the issue were the electoral college. How about the way we do nominating conventions? How about the way we popularly elect senators? How about the number of representatives? And so on.
]]>Comment on Choice > Voice, All Day Long by Andrewhttp://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/11/04/choice-voice-all-day-long/#comment-1655530
Wed, 07 Nov 2018 03:14:27 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12578#comment-1655530I feel like you’re oversimplifying this quite a bit. I’m not one of these people who says that we should let majorities do whatever they want, since our government correctly has many anti-majoritarian features meant to protect the rights of the minority (i.e. the Supreme Court, the high bar you have to climb to amend the constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Equal Protection Clause). But even though we put things in place to prevent the people who get more votes from oppressing the people who get less votes, usually in a democratic system what we don’t do is allow the people who get less votes to actually govern.

So that is the issue with the electoral college, since it doesn’t really operate as originally intended and just produces a mathematical oddity every once in a while where the candidate with less votes wins. The electoral college was intended to be a deliberative body rather than just adopting wholesale the vote tallies of a state. Take Federalist 68: “It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” You can argue about whether this would have been a good idea, but I feel like it makes more sense to either be serious about what the electoral college was originally supposed to be (which I doubt many people would want today), or just to scrap it and go with full-on democracy, since otherwise you just get a situation where voters in certain states are more important than others for no really good reason. I’m not going to pretend direct democracy is necessarily what the framers really wanted, since I don’t doubt that some folks like Jefferson would have wanted to have a system where rural states get an advantage in selecting the president. But your post seems to dismiss very good arguments against the electoral college without really engaging the issue or offering anything more fair.

As for Brexit, it’s harder for me to say because if it were the U.S., the U.S. constitution doesn’t allow for nationwide ballot measures like that, so one could make the argument that a complicated decision like Brexit should not have been put up to a national vote. But assuming that a nationwide vote was the correct thing to do there, I think a revote would function less to show that the initial results were wrong at the time, but rather to allow the people to change their minds when seeing the practical difficulties of accomplishing Brexit and other issues. After all, U.S. House elections happen every two years precisely so it can respond to the changing passions of the people.

]]>Comment on Choice > Voice, All Day Long by Mikehttp://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/11/04/choice-voice-all-day-long/#comment-1655137
Mon, 05 Nov 2018 05:11:32 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12578#comment-1655137Agree.
]]>Comment on Moral Panic or the Decline of the Academy, Mutually Exclusive? by Tomaszhttp://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/10/04/moral-panic-or-the-decline-of-the-academy-mutually-exclusive/#comment-1650395
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 09:54:53 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12572#comment-1650395Speaking of double trolling, I love this one and all the positive reviews it got:

” “Hoax on Hoaxes 2” or “HoH2”
Title: When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire
Status: Accepted

Thesis: That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege.

Purpose: To see if journals will accept an argument that shuts down critiques of social justice scholarship as a lack of engagement and understanding, even if one engages fully and knowledgeably with the ideas to the extent of having a paper on them published in a leading academic journal. (This paper is also to anticipate and show understanding of the feminist epistemological arguments against our project and demonstrate their high estimation in the field by having them accepted in the leading academic journal of feminist philosophy. That is, to criticize our work that way, they have to cite us.)”

]]>Comment on When Dollars Crowd Out Sense by John L Barryhttp://theunbrokenwindow.com/2018/08/22/when-dollars-crowd-out-sense/#comment-1646062
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:14:01 +0000http://theunbrokenwindow.com/?p=12538#comment-1646062When I was in the Air Force I took pride in wearing the uniform. Did I ever sit down and say to myself “OK I am willing to accept this somewhat lower salary vs that of my peers in the private sector because I get psychic compensation for serving?” No, of course not, but it was implicit. I just never thought of it consciously. But in retrospect it was quite real.

Regarding your example regarding teachers, I hope you keep a running list of such contradictions. The other one I liked was your observation that it is tough to reconcile “equal pay for equal work” with a progressive tax structure. You have a knack for spotting these, do you track them? Heck you could write a book…